My mood improved this morning when I gave a name to the painting of yesterday. The name is Encumbered Flow (I wrote this a week ago).

I had a not-so-good feeling about this painting and I thought about different ways to change it by adding more things.

I didn’t.

Maybe I could change the contrast between the brush lines and the squarish shapes of the colors, by painting the background. This would leave the drawing’s flow more clear. But I would loose the truth of the picture. So I left it as it is.

Eliminating the white ‘windows’ inside of the flowing shape was another possibility. It could let the drawing flow better too.

Do you see this?

The white little spaces are like interesting out-of-context things that attract you to them while making the complete flow less important. So the flow feels hesitant.

Maybe it is not important to finish the flowing shape’s rout? This may even be a good thing, when, for example, you walk in a new place and the interest in the local details causes you to not finish the rout that you decided to take.

But a painting is a whole route thing, isn’t it? You have to see all of it if you want to feel the composition. The composition is the most important thing in a painting.

And maybe this is not true any more? A person can choose to live in one interesting place all his life and never visit any other towns or villages, and he can have a fascinating life. In the same way, he can define his own little composition in a part of the painting. It all depends on what interests him and what he wants to do or be or experience.

You see? This is where this painting is coming from. Everything I thought before is being challenged now.

Not that there are right things and wrong things, and my job is to find the right ones. No, there is not even one right thing. There is not even one wrong thing. There is the choice. So I chose to leave the painting as it is. By giving it the name Encumbered Flow I acknowledged what I did not like about it before. Now I like it for being a truthful description. I don’t fight with it any more. I am at peace. And I am free now to start another painting.

I like the painting more when I get very close to it. So close, that I almost don’t see all of it. This is also how I like to paint. The world around the painting disappears and all I have is the lines, the colors, the shapes, the textures. It is an extremely pleasant world for me. Who knows what’s in it? How deep can we go in it? Does it mirror me? These questions come to me now.

Maybe answers will come if we look at the painting and see what we can learn from it.

The lines in red are the energy in my body or maybe better, in my being. I know, because this is what I wanted to draw. The energy goes up, it feels to me, like fire, but not that fast. The energy does not stop. It goes and goes and goes. It is a good feeling, basically, of wellbeing.

Yes, you can detect some hesitation and doubts here and there, by the direction of the lines. But it flows on. This is the life as it comes together from so many shallow and deeper layers of thoughts. Thought after thought and Choice after choice, I determined how this flow of the energy of my now-life will go.

Take a little distance now and see those thoughts, those choices that build the flow.

They look like leaves here, with different emotional charges (colors). And their movement is not so unlike the movement of the energy. They represent all the same directions that appear in the flow of energy. This is expected. In some places the leaves seem to get entangled and almost become a blockage. But once their influences come together in the flow, they seem to move more in agreement.

How can it happen? There must be some other influences. And these are the yellow and orange shapes. Two of them, those with the straight lines, look like big bodies of light, or I can imagine them to be knowledge that is bigger than the stories in the leaves. And we have the rounded orange cloud that also contains that light in it. I won’t escape, I realize, without saying the word love.

And if you look at the general composition you can see that there is a lot of white space in the picture. This makes whatever happens in the picture, all that we talked about before, less significant. The forms may break apart, become brittle and dissipate in the white space. There is drama in the forms but the stronger presence is that of the white, into which all of the dramas may disappear.

And there are the three pencil lines. They seem to be some spontaneous excited declarations, while the more quiet curious shapes and the murmuring energy do their parts.

Now we can go back to the questions I asked in the beginning.

What is in it? It is not a question any more. Or, indeed, it could have been something else.

Does it mirror me? Of course, and probably mirrors every one else, in different variations.

How deep can we go into it?

The thoughts and choices belong to what we did throughout life or lives, so even if we go deeper than we ever thought possible, we will still encounter the same situation in which some kind of believed stories create flows of lives. The possibilities are infinite, and limited at the same time.

If we go into the white, we know it has no end. Every time we go a little or much into the white, we cause a change in our stories and in the flow. Our ’now’ changes. It can become more or less beautiful, more or less heroic, more or less of anything.

The ‘now’ is where our frontier is. This is where we come with all the stories that we have created and the ways that they have interacted and built flows, and with these we face and touch the white. The white can only touched in the now. Maybe we will step a little more into it, and all that we are, will change again.

Now the white laughs and says, between rolls on the ground and back flips: you have never been anything but white.

Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.

My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.

I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.

And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.

The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?

(The other colors came later.)

Now in a different way:

Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.

The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.

For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.

The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.

Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.

And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.

I started to draw when I had a very strong pain. I held on to the act of drawing as to something that saved me from sinking in a bog of pain. I did not want to loose my humanity. I also held on to drawing because I wanted to have some sort of a backbone, when everything else was breaking apart to meaningless good-for-nothing, directionless pieces.

The top left part, where I started the lines, is a possible visual interpretation of pain, sharply spreading, attacking everything in all directions.

Then I left the stage, so to speak. The first spontaneous burst of drawing calmed me down a little, and my by-now-natural-tendency to go deeper into myself, to allow for a deeper view to emerge took over.

This created, still in the ’lines’ department, a pen-like thing, thin and clumsy, self-guarding like a soldier in uniform, standing straight and holding with one hand this grand explosion, almost as if it is a flower. I did not think this thought when I drew. I just drew what came to me, basically not knowing what I was doing. Or you can say, I was trusting my inner guidance.

This soldier is supported by a complicated and inefficient scaffolding, in yellows and browns. The yellow color does not give a sense of strength to the scaffolding.

This scaffolding has another shape, in green, connected to it on one side. In that shape, there are teeth that are pointing inward, like an aggression that is directed inward.

I can almost say that it feels as if the scaffolding is trying to push this green part away, but can’t get rid of it. (The colors don’t feel good together.)

The color areas create two layers. To say it in a short way, the blue is behind everything else.

The layer of the pink, browns, yellows and reds is like an emotional echo of what the lines do. In the middle there is the aggression in all directions (in pink), and the rest are all the broken parts, including the spectacularly dramatic yellow in the upper left corner. There is drama there, no doubt.

In blue there are bridges above and under each other in what can go on forever without giving a sense of meaning, since it does not seem to matter if you go up or down. This adds to the meaninglessness.

So what did the diving-in bring up?

A big confusion, happening without any clear purpose, destructing something emotional while holding on as much as possible to the figure of the soldier, as the protagonist, who is being propped up somehow by a needlessly complicated scaffolding and showing off its anger as a flower.

Wow.

Or maybe I should say woe.

Isn’t the soldier like the ego? So fearful, so lost and confused, but pretending to be strong, accompanied by self-hatred, and displaying some dramatic fireworks while feeling so limited.

So what good is that for? What did I gain from drawing?

Seeing that this pain event creates such a sorry state requires two participants.

One is the event itself with all that happens. The second is the seer, the one who witnesses. And you have to admit that the seeing is pretty comprehensive, psychologically speaking. The pain has become a richer event, with self-hatred, with the inflexibility and fear of the ego, with all that is constructed to keep the ego in place, with the complexity of what holds the ego in place, and with displaying the drama almost as a way to decorate the ego.

First came the initial scream. The viewer at that point was the ego himself. Then, with calming down, it became possible to choose a different perspective to look from, by using a different style of consciousness. Instead of the narrow style, of one thought after another, of cause and effect along the same path, the attention started to be given to everything at once, to all the participating shapes and the way they relate to each other.

When there is a strong emotional response, one thing becomes the most important one, while everything else disappears from view. But from the wider view, the relative importance of the pain diminishes, and all the parts and their relationships can be seen at once. So you see the whole structure of the event. It does not have a purpose and it does not have a hero.

How does consciousness change?

Just by making art, in which composition is of the most importance. If you want to make something that has beauty for you, you must pay attention to the composition. When you do that, the diving into a wider (and deeper) state happens on its own. I am talking here about why art is so powerful as the initiator of wellbeing.

With this deeper view and with the associations that arise, you start to know the complete situation, or you see in a more complete way than before.

Being in this relatively deeper state is pleasant. It gives a sense of control, of knowing, of peace and of being strong and unaffected by the suffering. It surely is a better state than the one it depicts.When I came to this stage, I did not feel the pain any more.

Before, when the pain was the most important thing, getting rid of it seemed to be the prerequisite for feeling better.

Now you become interested in changing the situation, not because you do not want to feel the pain but because you want to be in a different state, the state of the viewer. It is a totally different ballgame. You don’t need to have no pain in order to be happy. Happiness is yours by changing your perspective. It is insight. It is wisdom.

It is a big and meaningful change that is right under our noses.

If you do this many times, it becomes a habit. Suffering then leads you deeper and you feel better. You teach yourself to be free.

The lines, which are in purple, olive green and one little line is in blue.

The areas of color that appear to be behind the lines.

The red areas that are inside of shapes, delineated by some of the purple lines.

Many times it is enough to describe with words what you see in a picture, to know what it is about. This indeed is one of the ways to read art.

Here:

The system of lines that has its story, appears on the background of nothing. The story may be that the lines describe something, that some of them do something to other lines, that some are purple and some are in other colors, etc. The background of nothing is the white that has no features except that there are no colors and no shapes in it.

The system of colored areas appears behind the line system. The colored shapes system has its own story. It is not being told in continuous lines or shapes. Things appear mostly unconnected. But you can feel relationships. For example, you can feel that all the greens belong to each other because of having the same color. All the shapes, because of their general outline, which is softly rounded, without sharp points or angles, all of them are of the same kind. This whole system appears in the same proximity of the lines system, and therefore the two systems seem to be related to each other, as if they are parts of the same thing. How about seeing this as a person and his emotional system. (Here I went beyond just describing what I see. I added an idea that seemed to make sense to me.)

There is one shape among the colored areas that is different. It is the blue one that looks like a river or a road. It goes from close to us to another place far away that we do not see. This may be the path of life on which we float with ease or with struggles. (again, an interpretation. It can be something else too. But something that leads the eye far away, to where you cannot see the end, these can be seen.)

Now let’s take the reds, which got caught within some of the purple lines that created closed shapes. Usually in the picture, the lines go freely to wherever they go. They describe shapes, that you have a feeling are not finally determined. These shapes still can grow, shrink or move. But these areas that caught the red inside of them seem to be more final. Their muscles are stretched and tense, holding the red and preventing it from changing. This is where the happily and freely flowing human system is becoming hard and inflexible. This goes against the nature of free flow and therefore it is the place of suffering.

And all of this appears to play in an environment of no features (the white). This is not a physical portrait in a realistic environment. It is the inner experience of life, created in awareness and experienced in awareness, done and felt in the same moment. Doing and experiencing here are not separate.

And if you see that, where do you choose to place your identification? What part do you choose to be?

Here is another way to look at it:

There are two big systems that relate to each other harmoniously. There is no event in that. Only a continuous flow. The two systems can go on and change together, every one of them in its own related way to the other. They can go on forever. But the minute the regularity is broken by an unusual behavior that occurred in a few parts, an event is created and it starts to be interesting. That’s life.

Where was the identification, when it happened?

It was in the parts that caught the red. “I must have this red in me,” said the ‘I’ who identified with these parts. Before, there was freedom there. But now the travelling ’I’ became imprisoned in his own choice.